Spotlights

Jeffrey Selbin will receive the 2018 Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law teachers, which hailed him for showing “that instilling the desire and capability to provide public service must be a fundamental charge of legal academia.” Selbin has led clinical program initiatives at Berkeley Law since 1990.

Professor Leti Volpp is the new director of UC Berkeley’s Center on Race and Gender, a campus research unit focused on race, gender, and their intersections. The center fosters meaningful projects and exchanges between faculty and students, the university and local communities of color, and scholars worldwide.

Professors Bamberger and Hoofnagle have been selected by the U.S. Commerce Dept. and European Commission to serve as arbitrators for the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. The program offers binding arbitration for individuals whose personal information may have been compromised by companies transferring data from the EU to the U.S.

Elizabeth Cabraser ’78 was one of three attorneys to receive a 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Law Journal. A top class action litigator and a founding partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, she has led complex cases ranging from tobacco litigation to a human rights suit on behalf of Holocaust survivors.

Jean-Luc and Marc Fournier are the first multi-generational family duo to enroll simultaneously in Berkeley Law’s LL.M. program. Father Jean-Luc (professional track) and son Marc (traditional track) will both graduate with Berkeley Law’s Class of 2018. Read their story here.

Shneur Wolvovsky ’18 has begun a prestigious fall-semester clerkship with Israeli Supreme Court Justice Menachem Mazuz. A former U.S. District Court judicial intern (Eastern District of New York), Wolvovsky held editor posts at two Berkeley Law journals and won the Prosser Prize in his Written and Oral Advocacy course.

Some 35 local high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds recently completed the Center for Youth Development through Law summer program. They took part in classes and mock trials at Berkeley Law (led by its faculty, students, and alumni) while interning for law offices, public agencies, nonprofits, and elected officials.

Berkeley Law welcomed its Class of 2020 for orientation Aug. 17-18. The 304 students hail from 120 undergraduate schools and 20 countries of birth. This class, 42 percent people of color, includes a taekwondo black belt, a shepherd, a presidential appointee to NASA, a Navy diver, and someone who ran a theater company on Malta.

The first novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton ’09 is drawing rave reviews. Set in her native New Orleans, A Kind of Freedom follows three generations of an African-American family, while probing racial disparity in the South. Sexton launched the book August 15 at an open event at Diesel Books in Oakland. 

Steven Druker ’72 has won the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize for Outstanding Environmental Peace. Founding executive director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, Druker is an internationally renowned advocate for more governmental transparency regarding the risks involved with genetically engineered foods.